From the Dover Express and East Kent News, Friday 12 March, 1869.

THE BEER-HOUSE LICENSING SYSTEM

An interesting letter on "the haunts of Crime in London" appears in Wednesday's Times, and fully bears out the impression of those who have carefully watched the operation of the present system of beer-house licensing. The writer has spent three nights and a day investigating the haunts of crime. He says: The great haunts of crime are the low beer-houses, low lodging-houses, and the "leaving shops," and over these the police, as police, have no control. The penny theatres , the music-halls, or even the infamous neighbourhoods of Tiger Bay and Bluegate-fields are very minor  nuisances as compared with these. Let us take the beer-shops first. Over these the police have no power in any way. If a house with a spirit license harbour thieves , or be even what is called a disorderly house - that is, keeps open at all late beyond the usual hours, or serves men and women with liquor when they are already drunk - it is reported on to the bench of magistrates , and the spirit license is refused. Over the beer license the Excise only has power. As long as a man is willing to pay  for it he gets it, no matter what his character. Thus it of necessity follows that the beer-shop keepers are recruited from those publicans who have been considered not fit to hold a spirit license. The man loses his spirit license for misconduct, but not his beer license. He turns his public-house into a beer-shop, and his wi9fe opens a green-grocer's shop next door. On Sunday morning all customers who come ostensibly for their cabbages can also get their beer, and the well-known habitude can, during church-time, go into the back room behind the shop and get their gin and rum too.

Take a high-class one, for instance. It is near an East-end Road. It is brightly lighted, clean, and comfortable. The landlord and landlady are behind the little bar. Both are known to be convicted thieves, both are known to be lucrative receivers and expert disposers of stolen goods. Let us pass into the parlour. It is very wide, well-furnished coffee-room, the walls of which are simply garnished with glaring pictures, and at the table in it some eight or nine well-dressed men are sitting over their cigars and beer. There were the elite of the swell mob. There was nothing about them externally to distinguish them from the ordinary frequenters of Pall Mall or St. James's Street, yet there was not one who, as our inspectors and sergeants assured us, had not been convicted of "robberies from the person" over and over again. Our entry, I am sorry to say, seemed to throw a general damp upon the company. There was an utter silence, and then, at intervals of a few seconds, one after another went out to get a cigar or a glass of "old and bitter," all of which they must have found it particularly difficult to find, as none of them came back.

This was a first-class thieves beer-shop, and it is quite needless to go through the dirty gradations of them. let us look into a low-class beer-shop - that is to say, low-class in the neighbourhood, in its appearance, and its customers. The low beer-house for the worst class of thieves is generally in an ill-favoured "slum," ill-looking and worse smelling, with a group of tawdry women choking up its narrow entrance, and half-naked children playing about barefooted on the slimy flagstones, and hiding amid the dust-heaps. At the upper end of the court is a broad dim light, to which our party at once made their way, and passed through a low bar into a small tap-room. Quick as we were, however, we were not quite quick enough to prevent the large party there secreting the cards with which they were practising. I use these words practising advisedly, for most of them were only occupied in attaining perfection in the three card trick or in ringing the endless variations on the cards with a view to future and certain profit at the racecourses and country fairs. An ill-looking bull-dog, by no means the most ill-looking of the company, came towards us as we entered, but was at once called off by its master and then, as in the better class of thieves' houses , we sat down in our corner amid a dead silence, broken only by a few muttered words of slang or an occasional spitting on the table to efface the chalk marks by which they had been practising some gambling game. The room was low, ill-smelling, and very full - full, too, of the lowest description of broken-down fighting men , card and skittle sharpers, and thimble-riggers. One is known over half the country fairs and racecourses in England as the very prince of successful swindlers. the others were all known rogues and vagabonds, who had been convicted as such over, and over again. As with the swell thieves' beer-house so with this infamous haunt, as soon as our party came in, its regular occupants instantly and silently departed with the single difference that while the first-named class affected gentility in their departure and wished "Good night," the latter did not conceal their fear, but slunk away as much as they could unnoticed. Yet both classes were equally criminal, both were known as having lived by crime only, and as certain only to live by crime while they were at large. Yet to neither one class nor the other could the detectives say a single word, for there was no specific charge against them, and they went out as usual from their beer-shops to prey on society at large, whether rich or poor.

Occasionally in these places the detectives find a strange face, but this can generally be accounted for by the fact that he is a thief who has made his own particular district or beat a little too hot for his safety, and son he shifts to another quarter till risk has blown over. In such cases the old adage that there is "honour among thieves" resolves a fresh illustration, for the newcomer under temporary hiding is always sheltered and fed by his colleagues in crime, or, if his offence is serious and he is well known, is sent away to the country, perhaps for months.

Among the worst class of beer-houses are those which continue beer selling with some other trade. These are always able to elude the vigilance of the police, and in those the regular receivers of stolen goods awaits for the boy thieves, from whom they will purchase anything, a single shoe, a pewter pot, a waggoner's whip, a horses nosebag, a piece of bacon, a brace of pheasants, a watch or handkerchief, anything and everything in fact, on which these insatiable young vagabonds can lay their hands. The amount they receive for such articles is almost nominal, probably not more than a tenth of its value, so that a young thief has to pilfer to the value of some 50s. before he gets 3s. or 4s. to pay for his dinner, his place in  the gallery of a cheap theatre, and his supper and bed at cheap lodging-house. These receivers, under the present law, it is almost impossible to get hold of, for the boys themselves will not tell of them, they dare not and it need hardly be said that the receivers don't tell of themselves. With those receivers worse than thieves the very fountain head and sources of more than half the crime in London, the police are almost powerless to deal.

From the Dover Express and East Kent Intelligencer, 25 June, 1869. Price 1d.

TAPSELL v. KELCKY

There was a claim of £6 16s. for refreshment and money lent, plaintiff being a licensed victualler living at Dover.

In reply to Mr. Knocker, who appeared for the defendant, plaintiff said he had not been cautioned by defendant's brother that he must not trust the defendant. Defendant had not been drunk in plaintiff's house from day to day. Plaintiff knew that defendant's family were living in the town, but he did not consider that a reason why he should object to provide him with meals.

Mr. Knocker pleaded the section of the Act of Parliament prohibiting beer-house keepers from recovering payment for beer drunk on the premises and not paid for at the time.

The Judge said that this objection would only apply to a small portion of the account, the greater part of the claim being for money lent.

Judgement for £5 5s.

From the Dover Express and East Kent Intelligencer, 3 September, 1869. Price 1d.

HOP INTELLIGENCE

BLEAN:- Our hops promise well with continued fine weather.

BEKESBOURNE:- The gardens here are going on nicely, and we shall have a better crop than we expected three weeks ago.

BRIDGE:- We have a fair prospect of a bright sample, although the weight per acre as a rule will be light.

CHILHAM:- Some of the gardens in the parish will produce a good crop for the year, but others will produce scarcely anything.

CANTERBURY:- The hops that have been free from blight are progressing, and a small crop of good quality may be reasonably expected.

CRANBROOK:- The hops are now looking very handsome in some of the best grounds, and will produce a good yield. There are, however, some pieces which apparently will not be worth picking. Our aggregate crop will be small.

CRUNDALE:- The hops are coming on very nicely here; if the warm nights still continue, we shall again be favoured with a bright sample.

GODMERSHAM:- The crop will be light, but the appearance of the burr and the hops give signs of a good sample.

GOUDHURST:- The bine of the grape has been long hanging in the burr, but now the fruit appears coming out of the poles. We have some very bad pieces, and some very platter ones.

MAIDSTONE:- The fine weather has effected a great improvement in those hop gardens which were not previously "done." Many grounds in the neighbourhood will grow a good crop for the season.

TENTERDEN:- The hops in this neighbourhood are gradually improving where the bine is strong and healthy. Where, however, it is weak, very little progress appears to be made, and we fear they are gone.

PETHAM:- The average here must be considered under that of last year.

SELLING:- In this usually favoured district the gardens are looking very spotty and uncertain as to produce. However, appearances are better than was expected a week or two since.

WINGHAM:- The gardens have been improved. They are very variable, and will produce, in all probability, from 2 to 5 cwt. per acre.

SUSSEX:- Some few hop gardens will produce a good crop, but the total produces will be very small.

WORCESTER:- Our plantation accounts generally are rather more favourable. Those grounds where the bine is pretty good and nicely in burr, and in some places coming into hop, it will only be a top crop, and when this is the case they rarely turn out so many as the general appearance would lead us to expect, but where the bine is deficient and hardly blighted, they will do little or nothing. We cannot grow more than one third last year's crop.

From the Dover Express and East Kent Intelligencer, 24 September, 1869. Price 1d.

HOP INTELLIGENCE

BIDDENDEN:- In most grounds the quantity of hops has fallen  very short of even the low estimates put upon them. Coloury samples will be very scarce.

BRIDGE:- The hops in this neighbourhood were considerably damaged by the gales. The crop in most places will be very light.

CHARTHAM:- The terrific winds almost ruined our hops. Picking in some gardens will be over in a week.

CRANBROOK:- The boisterous weather so badly bruised and battered the hops as to render it almost impossible to make a good coloury sample. The hops have come down short of expectation, and the aggregate yield in this parish will scarcely be one-half of that which was anticipated.

FRITTENDEN:- Picking will almost be finished by the end of this week. That the hops come down fast is a general complaint; in many cases, where they were set at 6 cwt. per acre, they come off at two and three. Samples will be very scarce.

MAIDSTONE AND ADJOINING PARISHES:- The hops have come down very fast. The samples gathered first came out very bright, but very thin in quality. Since the high winds the hops are much better in colour and quality than could have been expected, and come well to the scale. The picking in some gardens will be finished this week.

The great demand for hands to gather in the hop crops in Kent has induced pickers to strike for an advance of remuneration. A large number of Irish tramp into the country every year to work at hop-picking, and in the commencement of picking the usual prices per bushel were agreed upon. Subsequently an advance was made, and next came exorbitant demands from the "old hands," against which a stand was made by the hop-growers. Now the boys and inmates of parochial schools and workhouses are employed, and the Londoners and others who came down for hop-picking assist, the Irish "professionals" being excluded from the plantations. On Monday there was a perfect exodus of Irish, who in batches started of for Sussex and Surrey to procure employment in gardens there.

From the Dover Express and East Kent News, Friday 8 October, 1869.

WITH THE KENT HOPPERS

[From the Daily news]

Hop-picking is like travelling  on the Continent or staying at the sea-side - with a difference. It is the annual jaunt, the periodical holiday of thousands who look forward to this break in their hard lives all through the year, and who enjoy change and gain health even while they bring in grist to their modest mill.  Your London costermonger becomes quite pastoral among the hops, so does the Irish labourer, the dockyard hanger-on, the nondescript from Whitechaple or Sevendials. There is a wild freedom about the few weeks of country life in the open air, a pleasant picnic flavour in the meals cooked and the rest taken gypsy fashion, and social delights arising out of companionship, all of which are inexpressibly fascinating to the humble town worker and the restless town vagabond. Anybody can be a hopper. It needs but to have the use of the ten fingers and a disposition to try the experiment to become a proficient in the calling. Women and children are as clever at it as men , and he whose quiver is fullest makes the most money during the brief season of whom three to five weeks. No wonder, then, that as surely as August and September come, do the thousands turn thoughts and steps to the great hop counties, there to linger there until there are no more poles to pick and no more bins to fill.

Far away down the South-Eastern Railway, leaving its main line, and following a minor branch which winds in river fashion towards the coast, we are in a pleasant Kentish valley, with vast regiments of hops on either side. Our valley has a river , whereupon smart wager-boats  and outriggers  are often seen, and spacious mansions and pleasure-grounds and broad acres of orchards and nut-fields stretch up its sloping sides and meet the sky. But it is one object now is hops. The yield of nuts and apples will come next, and the picking of these is spoken of as being "almost like a small hopping," but the compliment is evidently hyperbolic; and nothing conceivable to the country mind comes near the great deeds of to-day. Out of the 60,000 acres of hop-garden in England nearly 30,000 are in Kent and out of the 30,000 in Kent the largest gardens and biggest yields are here. Hope are not only in the fields but in the air. You small as well as see them, and those huge brick structures with wooden cowls, like giant chess-castles which have been crowned obliquely with fools' caps, emit suphurious odours, due to the baking and drying of the tender leaves.

First, to the interior of these buildings, known as "oasts," where, on the ground floor, is a central chamber with furnaces of coal and coke in full work, the brimstone in dull white lumps interspersed among them. This ingredient gives a brighter colour to the hop when dried, and makes it "livelier." The mass we saw in the upper chambers  after drying recovered their shape and look, the instant after they were squeezed in to a round ball in the hand - a single proof of merit. Hop leaves which remain torpidly together, continuing in the aggregate in  in the shape in which they have been tempered by temporary pressure, and not viewed with favour by buyers; and though this year's crop is comparatively poor, it was satisfactory to observe  that, accordingly to the received test, the Kentish hops are excellent in quality. The drying floor is above the furnaces, and is gained by stairs from the outside. It is circular, and has a flooring of about 56 feet in circumference, formed of wire netting. This is carpetted with coarse hair cloth, through which the warm air ascends, and which is sufficiently strong though its extreme elasticity, combined with the heat and the remenbrance of what was below, gave the writer some qualms as he walked over and stood in the middle of it, in obedience to instructions. A very large battledore of open-work cat-gut kind, with the writer and a completion standing in its centre while it is being used as a frying pan over an enormous fire, each footstep betraying a tendency to send the intruders up elastically in shuttlecock fashion, is what a hop drying-room resembles most. Mush impressed with the novelty of the situation, and with the fumes of sulphur settling on the chest in a way that makes your lungs feel as if they were baked, you back out cautiously to the little trap-door at which you entered, and go down steps into the loft which is known as the cooling chamber. This is full of hops. They lie in a great mass, and with an undulating surface like a yellow sea; while at one corner the head and shoulders of a man who appears to be actively engaged in keeping himself upright by treading water strengthens the illusion. A nearer inspection shows him to be in a round trap-hole, into which a sack, or "pocket," fits, so as to hang at full length through the ceiling of the floor below. A lad feeds this sack by constantly shovelling into it the dried hops, which the man wedges together with his feet. So that, when we pass down  stairs and pat and punch it and its fellows, we find  them hard and solid, as if of so much wood. One hundred pounds of hops, green as when picked, often become about twenty pounds after drying and cooling; quite eighty per cent of their weight  being often carried off through the cowls by evaporation during  their eight or ten hours' sojourn in the hot chamber we have left.

 In the fresh air again with thee same curious feeling of having suffered interior baking, and after seeing various checks and counterchecks  for testing  the produce of each acre, and the amount gathered  by each "company",  we leave the pickers' dwellings  to be noticed later, and are in the centre of a hop garden, and in the midst of an open air gathering several hundred strong. It is a heterogeneous mixture of young and old, of costermongers male and female, of contingents from the neighbouring village, who work together and who speak of the other hop-pickers sententiously as "trash;" of babies cradled in hops green from the poles, or suspended from their mothers' necks as the latter pick, of sunburnt children and aged men and woman, of active "tellers," bin masters, and overseers.

There are eight pickers in a company, and one company  and four frames to a bin. A frame consists of a large open pouch made of course  canvas suspended from poles, at which the pickers stand in the attitude of washerwomen at their tubs. As soon as we are in their midst, a lively young woman with sparkling eyes, ruddy cheeks, and a roguish smile, prostitutes herself at our feet. It is very odd, but rushing forward as if in sudden ecstasy, she deliberately bows her head, and her little figure is in an instant in such a position that the next step forward must be ion or over her body. Nor does she remain still. Her hands and arms are soon busy, and after embracing, or seeming to embrace, each of her feet in turn, she rubs hop-leaves over her boots, and then holding up a handful, waits patiently to see what we shall do. It is very suggestive of eastern reverence for authority. It is, indeed, the sort of greeting Ruth might have offered Boaz, and seems altogether out of keeping with the time and place. But the expression of the lady hop-picker who has thus favoured us, soon puts the writer at his case. It has in it no slavish respect for more externals; and it is clear now that whatever else may have prompted this extraordinary ceremony, neither abject reference for respectability, nor formal obeisance to an employer's guest, has any share in it. The woman laughs satirically, and holds up hop-leaves in each hand as if in some inexplicable way, she had got the best of us; her companions titter gleefully, and one of them, an old lady with a face which reminds one of sour fruit, is inclined to be quarrelsome on "Biddy having pushed before her to the gentleman's feet" (she called them "fate"), just as she, the speaker, had announced her "intention of trying it on." The murder was out now. The oriental symbolism, the prostration, and the signs, all resolved themselves into a claim for beer. This is the way hop-pickers call upon strangers to pay their footing; for thus to rob a stranger's boots with hops entitles the person rubbing  to a gratuity, and the experiment was repeated upon ours half-a-dozen times in the course of the day.

The hop garden we are in is a mighty field, spreading over nearly a hundred acres, and is, early in the morning, covered with a perfect forest of erect and leafy poles. On each side of it are other fields similarly filled, and the hoppers fasten on it like an invading army or a flock of locusts. There is great method in their attack. The bin-master draw lots from the foreman as to where each shall take his company, for some parts of the garden give a better yield than others, and this decided, the frames and canvas pouches  are carried down and fixed by the pickers with military regularity. Where we are there are some 264 pickers, 32 bin-men, and four measurers, and the "pokes" are open-mouthed sacks being carried down  on their frames by male and female  bearers, look exactly like rough beds for the wounded and dying. These are brought across the field  in various directions - now down to the ambulance (hop) waggon waiting at the corner of the shady lane there to deposit their contents; now to the field not yet begun, where they wait for the bin-men to bring down the lofty poles and leave them ready for picking. The field or garden was planed early in the century, and has each September  presented just such a sense as we witness now. A few hours convert it from a forest into a desert, and the tapering spars which in the morning reared themselves aloft, and were so full of graceful beauty, and converted before sundown into plain brown sticks strewed over the plain like so much giant fire-wood.

Hopping is a merry pursuit. there is abundant  laughter and broad merriment  at the "pokes," and it is a little curious to remark how many  of the workers you speak to are here "for their health." They repudiate all notion of coming for gain, maintaining that they can make far more money at their respective homes, but that they find a few weeks in the hop-field "puts them together like this," that they can  "eat twice as much here as when they're at home in Westminster;" and that the smell of the hop is a specific for numberless complaints. There is a little truth and a great deal of  fiction in these speeches. The healthfulness of "picking" is undoubtedly, but the majority  of the men and women before us are invariably poor. the Smith's from Pye Street, who could "earn his two pounds  a week at home, which his wife could earn her sixteen shillings by trouser making, which made two pounds sixteen a week, don't yer see," and insisted that he came into the hop-fields annually purely as an outing, obviously lied; so did the costermonger, and the costermongers' girls, who spoke of their savings bank accounts with tongue in cheek; and the dockyard worker, whose wages "at home are 5s. 6d. a day." These were, we were assured, purely conventional speeches, indulged in to mystify strangers, and were useful only in showing  the uniformity with which the game of brag is played. But the history of the great majority of the pickers was written in characters which are not easily misunderstood. Times are universally admitted to be harder than over this year, and the fact of the hop-gathering season only occupying  three weeks instead of five as when the yield is great, is mourned  over bitterly by those who have found their way to Kent from afar. The Irish workers are among these, gaunt, hungry-looking men and women for the most part, and with immense families. They are among the best labourers in the hop-garden, seldom giving in the bad weather, but picking placidly on in the heaviest rain; and a man, his wife, and children, have been known to earn together as much as ten shillings in a day. The Irish pickers are described to us as "close," living on next to nothing, and seldom spending their earnings on animal food. Many of the bin-masters we see have picked hops on this same ground for years; applying regularly in writing to hop-growers  at the commencement of the season, and bringing down their own gang or company of eight. These are always good workers, ranking next to the resident pickers  of his own parish in the estimation of the foreman, and pulling together amicably through the season.

It is evening before the field is finished, and when  lots have been drawn for the  stations at which the several companies shall begin work in the adjacent grounds on the morrow, there comes a discussion  as to who shall pick up the waste when the picking  has been too hasty to complete. Just before a field or garden is finished  there is always a more or less tumultuous rush to the last poles left standing. The discipline observed through the day is cast to the winds in anxiety to have "the last pull of the field," and the pickers as well as  the bin-men rush at the poles pell-mell, so that many of the leaves get thrown under foot. It is unnecessary to say that nobody will admit that they have been concerned in this, and it is only after sonorous blasts from a tin trumpet, and peremptory commands to all bin-men to help in gathering up the waste leaves have been given, that this portion of the work is set about. Every one on the field has agreed to certain conditions, and to have refused point-blank would have been like mutiny on the high sea, so after much grumbling and loud protests from everybody that they at least had not been concerned in the final raid leading to the waste, backs are bent and the picking up begins with the foreman-trumpeter looking on.

After the "pokes" have been gauged, and the contents of each entered by the measurers in their books, the day's work is over. The villagers make their way back to their homes, and it is easy to see that the great problem of woman's rights is satisfactorily solved in Kent by wives and daughters taking an important share in out-of-door work. The women in this contingent were all eminently respectable, and, as we heard, wee-to-do. The wife, daughter and son of the farm baliff himself are all pickers for the time, and it was easy to see that all the available  strengths of the village is pressed into this service during the fleeting season. These go home without speaking or noticing the other labourers, who after a time make their way to the dwellings provided for them. We had heard so much of the discomfort and miseries of the hoppers'  way of life that we confess to have been agreeably surprised at what we saw now. Rows of brick buildings, well roofed and waterproof, with an amply supply of clean straw for bedding, and with ventilators, and an unlimited supply of firing and fresh water hard by, make no bad accommodation for people accustomed to live as many of those we talked with; and from a vast improvement upon the old days when pigstics and stables were held to be sufficient for what the exclusive villagers call "trash." The sexes are divided, the single girls being put together, and the single men and the families grouped in cabins to themselves. This is as much as the employer can do. It is impossible to exercise complete supervision, or guard the morality of people who are gathered together for a short time under circumstances which are thoroughly exceptional, and no means can be adopted for preventing communication between the various classes if those composing them are bent upon it. At right angles with the rows of huts, which face each other like little streets, is a long covered passage, at the end of which is the pump, and all along which are fires, with iron bars furnished with hooks for pot-boiling. here the evening meal is cooked, the kettles and pans which have done duty over fires extemporised in the hop-fields during the day being brought in for the evening meal. Here, too, is the great gossip-place after work is over, and the evening pipe is being indulged in before turning in. Sometimes the noisier spirits from the village tavern come in and brawl, but the rule we are assured is quietude and good behaviour.

These dwelling must not be taken as typical of those provided for the pickers in the hop districts; for in many instances military tents - a group of which, white and glistening in the sun, stood on the opposite side of the valley we were in - mud huts, and worst of all, overcrowded houses, are appropriate to them. The dwellings we describe are praised as being far above the average by their occupants, who profess great indifferences, however, to the way they are lodged, answering with one accord that a good season, with plenty to do and high wages, from the conditions they aspire to most.